


From Rot

by loop of rosewood (3point14rates)



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: F/F, beau/jes/yasha if u squint, prompt: family, technically a song fic, zombie apocalypse AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-31
Updated: 2019-07-31
Packaged: 2020-07-27 18:07:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,427
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20050300
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/3point14rates/pseuds/loop%20of%20rosewood
Summary: It's a world where everything dies, but alongside their friends, they've fought to make a life in it.An undead apocalypse swept over Exandria months ago. They've seen and done horrible things, they've lost people, but now the Nein Survivors have carved out a bit of safety for themselves, and Beau and Jester go on a routine patrol together.





	From Rot

The world was a graveyard without headstones; the dead and their lives and stories buried in shallow graves or left to rot under the sun. It was wild and untamed, overgrown with weeds; and as the old bones of civilization slowly bowed to the will of nature, The Lawbearer gifted her structures back to The Wildmother. 

The stench of death had become the stench of the world, an ambience that settled deep into soil and bark and flesh alike. There was nothing that would not rot away, eventually.

_ Except this_, thought Jester, as she held Beau’s hand.

They were on patrol duty together, carefully walking through the woods that were a fair ways away from the settlement the “Nein Survivors” had made by walling off a small section of an abandoned village. It was an important duty (or so Beau and Fjord and Caleb insisted) in making sure that swarms of undead didn’t start to gather and then box them in around the safe zone that had been established by Caduceus and Jester’s wards.

Jester longed to feel her wife’s skin against hers, but their hands were both wrapped in protective leathers: material sturdy enough to prevent the bite of an undead from breaking through. The reality was that beyond the boundaries of the warded zone, it wasn’t safe to leave any skin uncovered. The smallest bite or scratch was a death sentence.

{ _Jester still remembered the woman from the circus, holding her bloody arm and vomiting black ichor. Still remembered everyone huddled inside the Nestled Nook, the doors barred as the terrifying cacophony of moans and slams rattled the walls. Still remembered the woman passing out after hours of sickly terror, then minutes later, the same woman tearing into the man next to her with the same ferocity as the undead that had attacked her earlier._ }

“You okay, Jes?” Beau asked, giving her hand a squeeze.

“Mmm. Mostly,” Jester replied honestly. It takes a liar to know a liar, and so there was not much point in trying to lie to Beau. “I was just reminiscing. Thinking about how nice it’d be if we could be out in the open like this and not be all covered up.” She turned to her wife, and imagined the expression she might’ve been wearing under her mask and goggles. 

“Yeah,” Beau agreed with another squeeze. Jester could hear the sad smile in her voice. After a beat, Beau added, “Maybe one day you and Caddy can increase the range on your _ turn undead _ward, and we can just...go for a stroll.”

Jester smiled and projected her giggle a little so that Beau could hear her, her hips swinging of their own accord at the blissful thought of just strolling beyond the bounds of the Nein Survivors’ hodgepodge encampment, unguarded hand in unguarded hand with Beau, seeing her handsome and beautiful face smiling in the sunlight. “Maybe…. Oooooor, maybe one day we’ll have killed aaaaall the zooombies, and then we can go wherever we want!”

“One day,” Beau said, voice tinted with humor. “If anyone could clear the world of zombies, it would be us, right?”

“Of course,” Jester agreed. “We are suuuuuuper powerful. Me and Caduceus are already suuuuper goooood at just destroying undead things!” (Beau nodded and softly agreed.) “And Nott and Yeza make all those _ crazy _ traps, and Caleb has all his fiiiire magic, and Fjord has his tentacle monster.” (Beau snorted) “And you’re the _ strongest _ and _ fastest _ and _ best at breaking zombie skulls with your fists _.” If she hadn’t been wearing that annoying mask, Jester would’ve winked, so she was just extra suggestive with her voice instead. “It’s really hot,” she added, in case the intent was lost. (Beau chuckled.)

The smile underneath Jester’s mask swallowed her sadness as she briefly thought of the two members of their family they had lost, that wouldn’t be there with them at the end of the end of the world.

{ _Molly’s eyes, still open, still blood-red, devoid of life or recognition as his corpse stumbled forward. }_

_ { Yasha’s eyes. Cold, blank, resolved. “Don’t follow,” they said. _

_“Don’t save me.”_ }

“Maybe we’ll find Yasha,” Beau said, her simple statement brushing past Jester’s hidden facade, one she hadn’t even yet tried to present to Beau. “We’ll work our way across the whole continent, comb over everything, kill every zombie, and then she’ll just be there, wherever she wandered off to.”

“Probably reconnecting with her metal band,” Jester joked, and Beau chuckled, a little sadly.

Beau’s laugh was as warm and rich and hearty as summer honey. Her laugh was full of joy and hope. It should be out of place in a cold, cruel world of death, but to Jester, Beau’s laugh was the flower bursting stubbornly between the cracks of a cobblestone street; something as bright and beautiful as it was powerful and strong.

“We’ll find her absolutely shredding on a harp,” Beau suggested, always willing to follow Jester into that colorful world of imagination she had to escape to sometimes.

“One that’s _ also _ a _ sword _ that she swings at zombies when they get too close,” Jester added.

“Yeah, she’ll like, play the harp...attract a bunch of zombies to her...and then,” Beau chopped the air with a slicing motion and made a noise that was presumably the sound a harp-sword makes when it slices through skulls. 

“CLEAVE THEM AAAALL-” Jester started to scream in a mock-battle cry, but a wicked and gluttonous moan snapped her attention away, heart thumping like a rabbit dashing from a predator.

Deeper into the woods, an awkward figure, flesh moulded to moss, carried its thin, reedy legs with all the grace of a sickly doe. Its hands were outstretched, green fingers spasming covetously as its jaw snapped, rotten teeth poised and hungry. It stumbled closer, a weezing moan rattling from its throat, a shredded thing with bulbous fungus seeming to bubble from it.

Wordlessly, Jester and Beau got into position, releasing their clasped hands; Jester holding out her symbol of the Traveler and Beau pulling two throwing stars from her pouch. With a quick incantation, Jester set the undead’s rotting head alight with _ sacred flame _, and with two flicks of her wrists, Beau sent the tiny sharp metal stars through its exposed eye sockets.

The undead collapsed like a sack of scattered stones and sticks, and the forest returned to a strange stillness, save for the anxious rabbiting of Jester’s heart.

“Sorry,” she whispered as she let her symbol drop and hang from her belt again. “I shouldn’t have been so loud. That was stupid.”

“It wasn’t stupid, Jes,” Beau objected immediately. “That thing was so rotted, we might not have seen it as we walked by. You got its attention, so it walked right to us. And now anything else that’s nearby, we’ll hear it before it can get in range to hurt us.” 

Jester longed to see Beau’s face again, to see if she had that proud smile on her face. “In that case, we should probably sing a song as we go. That will wake all the zombies up, and then we can bop them back down.”

Beau chuckled, and somewhere a flower must’ve bloomed. “That’s a good plan.” 

Jester might've agreed, but her eyes caught sight of the destroyed, broken corpse and her mind couldn't help but-

{ _Fjord reaching out for Yasha, hand desperately outstretched. The strange look in Yasha’s eye, the look that said “Don’t follow,” the look that told Jester she wouldn’t be coming with them. _

_ The horrific, curling shriek Fjord unleashed when cold, dark claws ripped through his leathers, and sank deep like hooks into his arm. _

_ He was only alive because Beau had been so quick, and in such an impossible moment, had literally torn him out of the grasp of the clawed and enormous undead. He was only alive because Caleb and Caduceus had been so mercenary in removing his arm, in stopping the infection from spreading. _

_ The twisted wreck that had been made of his hand - stringy jerky stuffed into a detached arm, limp and bleeding on the dirt while they rushed the rest of him away, away, away. Fire and crossbow bolts and tolling bells were their wake as they ran screaming and crying away from the swarm of undead. Away away away from Yasha. _

_ Away away away from those eyes that said, “Don’t follow.” _

_Away away away as Yasha disappeared behind a wall of rotting flesh._ }

Beau held out her hand, and Jester grasped it with her own, entwining their fingers. Jester's heart thumped quickly again, but this time not because of fear. 

"You okay, Jester?" Beau asked carefully, sadly, understandingly, and Jester wondered if Beau's memories had drifted to the same place.

'Yes' was on her tongue, as light as a lie. All too easy to tell. "No," is what she said. 

{ _"Don't follow," is what Yasha's eyes said, and so they left her behind._ }

"Thinking about Yasha?" 

Jester almost could've cried for the strange relief it was to be so easy to read, or to be so in tune with someone else.

"Thinking about Yasha. Thinking about...this world." A world brimming and overflowing with life in some ways; the brightest green leaves shining gold in the morning light; flowers blooming in wild colors all across swaying grass seas; vines growing in elaborate nets and patterns up quietly crumbling buildings - but all that beauty was fed by ash, and dust, and bone, and rot, and bloody, wasting meat drying in the sun. Jester stared at the undead corpse as they passed. Beau took her staff and caved its skull in for good measure. Blood and brains leaked out, and it should have been more horrifying than it was.

"It gets monotonous," Beau said with a sigh as she wiped her staff clean. "Killing these things. It's all the same: Get 'em in the head, get 'em the head. Destroy the brain! Destroy the brain!" 

"Yeah. They should send something more interesting to kill our way," Jester joked and Beau scoffed good naturedly.

"An undead hydra, now _ that _sounds fun," Beau quipped, and Jester could hear the smirk. 

And then she could feel Beau's mood drop from the light joke to something more serious again. "I think she's alive. Yasha."

Jester turned to face Beau, taking in the contemplative angle of her chin behind the mask.

"If anyone could've survived that, it would've been her," Beau reasoned. "And we never saw an undead Yasha. Never found a pile of giant bones or…" She paused for a few beats, thinking. "She's alive."

Yasha had been gone for months. They had been on an excursion far, far from home, trying to find material components, like they always were, the rare sort that powered the casters' more powerful spells. They hadn't gotten what they had come for, and had been drained of almost everything; most of them beaten and exhausted within an inch of their lives, armor torn and sundered. They had to leave Yasha behind or be swarmed by undead. 

"I believe she is," Jester said, and it wasn't a lie. It was faith.

"Think she'll hate us?" Beau asked, and her tone showed it was an attempt at a joke, but the waver in her voice betrayed her genuine fear.

"...Maybe," Jester admitted, unsure. "Maybe she won't. Maybe she'll…" The name Zuala was resting in Jester's mouth, but she couldn't bring herself to say it. 

"I couldn't blame her if she did," Beau admitted. "But I can't blame us either, I guess."

"The world's not very fair, is it?" And Jester felt thick tears welling up in her eyes, clogging at her throat. 

Beau dropped their clasped hands and wrapped her arms around Jester, bringing her into an embrace. Jester wrapped her arms around Beau in turn, and felt her - strong, and sturdy, and scared, just like Jester.

"World's not fair," Beau agreed. "But we still have eachother. Still have the others. And we're going to do everything we can to keep it that way."

Beau pulled away slightly, and tipped Jester's chin up with one finger, so their masked faces could look at eachother. And then before Jester could finish a gasp, Beau pulled up her own mask and goggles and revealed her face, bare and warm out in sunlight peeking through the forest canopy. 

"Beau-" Jester started, but Beau just smiled, easy and confident, and a little scared, and Jester was a little too mesmerized to continue.

"We're gonna be okay, Jessie. Our family's strong, and we're smart, and we're capable. We make eachother better. We hold eachother together."

Jester pulled a glove off, eliciting a small anxious gasp from Beau. She put her exposed hand on Beau's cheek, and pulled her own mask off just high enough that it rested above her brow. 

They stood together, holding eachother, safety masks off, full faces exposed, a mile away from the safe zone. 

"We're gonna be okay," Jester echoed, tears still in her eyes, but she was smiling, and smiling in a way that Beau could see. "And one day, we'll be able to walk around without these dumb masks and hold hands and just go for a stroll in the woods."

"The masks are kind of cool," Beau interrupted, and Jester laughed.

"They are kind of cool, but I like your face more." Jester especially liked Beau's face when she was a little flustered. 

Beau tried to bite back her smile, but her cheek dimples gave her away. She pulled one of her own gauntlets off, and pulled Jester's hand towards her lips for a sweet kiss.

"Your face is pretty nice too," Beau said, smiling easily as she let Jester's hand slide back to her cheek. Beau slipped her fingers around Jester's wrist and held her in place.

"We've got plans," Beau continued. "We're gonna take this world back from...the dead, or whatever cursed it with this zombie bullshit. We've got these patrols to make sure the strays don't group up into bigger threats. We've got a garden, we've got thick walls (Jester snorted), we've got a watch schedule, supply runs - soon we'll have weird, wizard transportation circles."

Jester perked up at that - Caleb had been working on some sort of transportation magic that could instantly move them between magic circles. If they could get to Nicodranas and reconnect with her mama…

"We'll bring the world back," Beau continued, eyes bright with hope as she gazed at Jester. "Well, maybe not bring it back - but we’ll make something...something good. Or at least okay."

Jester couldn’t help but smile fondly at her wife, awkwardly stumbling over her words and declarations, but giving them no less meaning. 

The Traveler had always told her to have faith, to have hope, to turn to her imagination and create, make the things she imagined real. After that day at the circus, when the newly dead rose undead to feast on the living, after the world beyond her bedroom that she had only known for a brief few weeks rotted away...it had been hard to keep hope, hard to have faith, but it was the only thing she knew to do.

Spread joy, spread chaos...it was hard advice to follow in a world as bleak at this one. Her life before the rise of the undead had been nothing but ignoring a lonely and painful reality in favor of a cheerful fantasy, but peppy optimism could be a harsh offense in a world so relentlessly heartbreaking, in a world that left so many broken people wondering what the point of believing in anything was if everything good was just going to torn away, killed and consumed by the ravenous dead.

Still, she had tried, because it was all she knew how to do, to imagine something hopeful, imagine a world that was bright and fun and worth surviving in. And Beau had tried too, in her own way, rightfully angry and stubborn and beautiful. They all had. 

Fjord was no stranger to hardship; his whole life had been hard labor and scorn, the terrors of this world didn’t deter him from wanting to survive, to keep the family and acceptance he had found alive. Caleb had spent years wandering alone in conditions so miserable, it was as if he had pre-empted the apocalypse; Nott, too, had known pain and starvation and separation so powerful, it might have killed someone less determined. Caduceus seemed born for this world, crafted for it, as much as he hid his own anxieties behind a calm demeanor, as much as the presence of undead rankled his sensibilities, were the antithesis to his very legacy, a world of grief and of the dead and dying was one he had grown up in.

And Molly...and Yasha… Well. 

This world had taken a lot from this group of people. It had taken a lot from everyone. Snuffed out so much life, so much brightness, so much beauty.

Jester looked at Beau though, and felt her heart swell. Despite the impossibility of it all, despite the cold cruelty of this world that clawed at each beating heart with tooth and fang and claw and sickness and rot, Beau was still here. Defiant, as she ever was, in the face of corruption, of cruelty, whether that corruption or cruetly be societal or the will of the gods or nature itself, if something was wrong, Beau would defy it, if something was supposed to be certain, Beau would question it. If the world was supposed to end, Beau would be there, at the gates of hell or anywhere else, sturdy, unyielding, and ask, _ why? _

This world had taken so much beauty, but it still hadn’t taken Beau.

“We’ll rebuild, and make something better. You, me, and all of us,” Jester agreed. “For one of the improvements, I suggest a candy rollercoaster.”

Beau grinned. “That’s the first thing we’ll make.”

“And a _ petting zoo _! But ooonly of unicorns of different sizes.”

“Of course. As small as hamsters, all the way up to unicorn-sized unicorns. Ooh, we could get a sick-ass dragon ride....So I guess our vision of the new world is a carnival.”

“Guess so,” Jester said with a sad smile. “I think we’ve earned a carnival.”

They spent the next few hours of their patrol still hand-in-hand, dreaming up rides and attractions and performances for their definitely-real-future carnival, carefully talking-but-not-talking about the last carnival they went to, the carnival friends they’d lost.

As their shift started to wind down, Beau nodded to Jester, “You should sing on the way back. It was a really good idea, might wake up some zombies and then we can take care of them as we go.”

“Yeah. I’ve got Dimension Door just in case,” Jester said, anxiety carved too deeply into her bones to let her relax completely. 

“Good call.”

Jester thought about which song to sing, thought though all the lullabyes and melodies and ballads her mama used to sing to her, used to perform before an adoring audience. 

Beau asked, a little self-consciously, “What about that one that goes, um, ‘I ain’t scared, no not afraid, of the world in front of me...hmm hmm hmm, with a broken family’?”

“I could do that one,” Jester said, amused by Beau’s attempt at singing and the humming in place of forgotten lyrics. She thought fondly of the times her mama had sung that song for her; the times she’d sung it for her new family around a campfire or huddled in rundown buildings.

She took a breath, and then,

“There’s a fight to be won

For the love you at home.

Work to be done

Before you rest your weary bones.

I’m finding peace don’t come

To everyone I know,

So I will love in this life

Until I finally have to go.

Said I will love in this life

Until I finally have to go.”

The song drifted through the forest, joined by the chirping of evening birds. It roused a few zombies, which Beau and Jester easily dispatched, Jester interrupting her singing only to throw in a few verbal incantations. As they left the forest, moving past the scattered trees into the rolling, open plains the eventually melded into the village the Nein Survivors had made theirs, Jester had sung through nearly the whole song, reaching the end with the repetition of the chorus,

“Growing up child

Is just a matter of time

For giving all you’ve got

So won’t you dance under the sun.

Growing ooold

Feels like you’re giving up your soul.

I’d rather give it freely-”

“-To the ones that I call home,” an impossible, sweet, nervous, raw voice finished for her.

Jester and Beau froze, as if stuck in a memory. 

Stumbling out of the woods, bloody and bruised and exhausted, was Yasha. 

Jester and Beau broke into a sprint towards her, abandoning any sense of caution as Jester tackled Yasha into a hug, Beau following just behind to wrap them both in her arms.

“How?” Jester asked through the happy tears that streamed down her face.

“I don’t know,” Yasha said softly, so softly, almost like she was afraid Jester and Beau might shatter and disappear if she spoke too loudly. Jester clung to her more tightly, as if Yasha might disappear again if she didn’t hold on tight enough.

“Come on, let’s get you back,” Beau managed through the tightness in her throat, her usual skepticism sitting idle in the face of her relief. “Everyone’s gonna want to see you.”

It wasn’t long until they were within sight of the Nein Survivor’s encampment’s tall hodgepodge walls made of magic stone and dirt and the parts of destroyed materials from the village - a looming presence over the maze of traps and pits the Brenattos and Caleb had created. Jester and Beau guided Yasha through the arrangement as Beau shouted to Fjord, who was up on the wall for patrol, telling him to open the gates and get everyone gathered around. 

Fjord was stunned as he stared at who they had brought back with them; scratching at what was left of his arm, he shouted over his shoulder, “H-hey everyone, get over here, to the gates!”

“WHAT IS IT?” came Nott’s shrill voice, and when Fjord just told her again to come to the gates, she blasted a playful insult at him that he grumbled away.

Jester chanced a glance at Yasha as they approached the gates. As large and imposing a figure as Yasha was, she had always had a gentle and soft demeanor with her family, and the sound of Fjord and Nott's teasing banter seemed to fall over her like a warm and familiar blanket. 

The gates slowly opened, revealing behind them a bursting garden, four cozy cottages that they had divided themselves between in a facsimile of normality, surrounded by tall but crude walls, and a small, ragtag group bearing witness to the return of one of their lost family members.

Tears brimmed Yasha's eyes, and the shock and disbelief that had splattered over the faces of everyone on the other side of the gate - Fjord, Nott, Caleb, Caduceus, Yeza, Luc, Kiri - brightened into some sort of joyous bewilderment as they rushed forward to Yasha.

Nott tackled her, her tiny goblin frame launching at Yasha like a cannonball, then she wrapped her bony arms around Yasha's waist in the strongest, tightest hug she could manage. Kiri and Luc rushed up next, hand-in-hand, and making an echoed ruckus of joyous shouting. Caleb was just behind them, and put a careful hand on Yasha's shoulder, a small but genuine smile breaking through his usual high-strung gloom. 

Caduceus sauntered up easily, manner calm and eyes bright with some strange relief, like he _ knew _ and was _ certain _ things had to turn out this way, and he had needed that certainty to pay off. He offered Yasha, who still had Nott attached to her like a fanny pack, a broad and happy hug. Yasha leaned in and let Caduceus' arms wrap tightly around her as she hugged him in turn, and over his shoulder, she saw Fjord, approaching a little cautiously, nerves crawling across his skin as he rubbed at what was left of his arm.

Jester watched quietly as Caduceus and Nott released Yasha from their hugs, and Yasha looked at Fjord with regret carved deeply into her face.

"I'm sorry," she said softly, so softly Jester wondered if Fjord could even hear her. 

He must've, as he shook his head, bit his lip hard, then quietly replied, "Not your fault. I'm...I'm glad you're alive."

"I'm glad you're alive too," Yasha said, and she looked around to everyone: Kiri and Luc hugging her legs, Yeza off in the distance, Nott still close by with a gentle hand on her wrist, Caduceus hovering over her shoulder, Caleb off just to the side, Beau and Jester at her back. 

She said, as soft as a petal falling in the breeze, and as quiet and honest as Yasha had ever been, "I'm glad all of you are alive." And then, even softer still, and heavy with the weight of the burdens Yasha had dropped at her feet, "I'm glad I found you all again."

The moment hung in the air, the cumulative joy and sorrow of the small group of disparate souls winding around them as they all tried to find the words to say, words that could convey just how damn near _ complete _ they felt having Yasha back again. 

"Come on, let's get you cleaned up," Beau said, breaking through the silence, as she and Jester both placed gentle hands on Yasha's back and guided her home.

.

That night, they all elected not to sleep in their separate homes, but to once again join eachother under the magic bubble, together, safe and sound. Caleb was curled up with Nott and Yeza and Luc, Caduceus and Fjord laid out in the middle, and Kiri was wrapped up in Yasha's arms, with Beau and Jester spooned next to them. 

The world was still a cruel place that took more than it gave; it was a graveyard littered with dead friends, broken promises, and forgotten stories.

But even broken things can still grow. Rot fades into the soil, and from that old life sprouts something new. 

And that night, in silence, in peace, Beau and Jester slept under the stars, surrounded by the warmth and love of their new family.

**Author's Note:**

> Jester sings the song 'Growing Up' by Run River North. 
> 
> I initially intended to just make up a song for her, or just have her hum, but I might as well go full cheese. It's a good song for Jester and The Mighty Nein in general.
> 
> Writing this was a bit like coming home, so I hope you enjoy. Some folks might notice something familiar in parts of the prose.


End file.
